


Against Us and Within Us

by likeafouralarmfire



Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: F/F, null POV
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-22
Updated: 2017-03-22
Packaged: 2018-10-09 04:12:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,188
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10403664
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/likeafouralarmfire/pseuds/likeafouralarmfire
Summary: For drifters, soldiers and prophets, there's no forever. Root isn't asking for forever--just right now--and maybe that's why this works.





	

_[T]his we were, this is how we tried to love,_  
and these are the forces we had ranged within us  
within us and against us, against us and within us.

_-Adrienne Rich, Twenty One Love Poems_

 

* * *

 

Lately, Root’s been on this kick about shared geography. She brings it up while sitting on her bed, filing her nails. Black-streaked cotton balls litter her nightstand, and her nail beds look soft and pink and vulnerable without the polish.

“So if your mom was stationed in Texas in the early nineties, you couldn’t have lived more than a few hundred miles away from me.”

“What does that matter?”

“It doesn’t, I guess.” She finishes filing the nails on her left hand, licks each edge in turn to test their smoothness. The powdery smell of her freshly-filed nails overrides the lingering scent of acetone–the smell should be gross, but somehow it’s not, because it’s Root, and most things are different with Root. 

She pauses to trace her index fingertip with her tongue. Her eyes dance as she mulls something over–no, listens–and grins.

“What’s She telling you now?”

“She says when you were eleven and I was thirteen, we lived exactly 152 miles apart.”

Snort. “That’s not _that_ close.”

“When you grow up in the middle of nowhere, it is.” She examines her fingernails. “Two brilliant girls, only children, misanthropes to the core. I think we would have been friends, don’t you?”

“I didn’t have a lot of friends.”

“Neither did I.” She looks down at her lap and her smile falters. “It wasn’t a good time for me. Knowing you were somewhere sort of close feels… retroactively comforting.”

She looks up for a moment with bright, soft eyes, and then switches her emery board to the other hand and bends down to work. She doesn’t expect a reply–just wanted to say it–and that’s the beauty of being with Root: she ends her sentences.

 

* * *

 

Or sometimes the Machine finishes them for her.

It’s easy to tell when she’s been talking to the Machine–like interrupting someone right after they’ve hung up on a long phone call. Root blushes and smiles and glows in the hangover of their weird conversations. Almost like a teenager in love. Or maybe a prophet, or a martyr.

She never seems further away than when she interrupts whatever she’s doing to answer the call of her god. But there’s something brilliant and sexy about her complete surrender, sublimating her will to some greater plan.

That’s always been one of Root’s sexiest qualities. She’s wicked brilliant, in the way only truly fucked up people can be brilliant, but her devotion to something inhuman makes her into something completely new. When her ears prick up at something the Machine says and it’s suddenly clear it’s going to be that kind of party, whatever comes next is impossible to predict–and always interesting.

When she’s fresh off a mission, her kisses are deeper, more deliberate and sure. The taste of purpose–the taste of a god–lingers on her tongue.

 

* * *

 

Maybe that’s one of the reasons Root is almost never afraid–a pretty stunning trait for someone who generally feels the full spectrum of human emotion. Even when she flinches, when she gets hurt or is about to, the flinch doesn’t come from the same place as the fear most normal people have: the kind that extends into the past and echoes into the future. Her fear is animal, local, quick to fade. If she’d ever been in the military, those instincts would have been trained out of her by now. Training would have made her movements more–if not predictable, at least learnable, like John’s. Instead, she’s a wild card: an autodidact, a natural in every sense.

For all her focus and brilliant mind, a lot of things about Root are–not sloppy, exactly, but undisciplined. It would be massively annoying if it didn’t come from such a deep, sad place. From the little she’s said about her childhood, it seems like she basically sprung fully formed like this, with no one to teach her how to do things, no one to help or guide her.

That feral side comes out now and then when things are quiet, when she thinks no one’s watching. She’ll subvocalize while she’s coding, or pick at her nails until they bleed, or nibble absently on her fingers: the kind of little habits people develop when they’ve lived alone too long. Root isn’t used to being noticed–at least, not until she wants someone to notice her.

She seems to think her constant barrage of flirtation makes it impossible to sort the playful quips and power plays from the painful admissions. But she has a few tells that she doesn’t seem aware of. Her voice, mostly–sometimes a flutter, sometimes a way-too-deliberate drawl–that marks the moments she cares a little too much.

Her body, though–that’s the biggest tell. 

On top, she’s a drill sergeant: precise and skillful, with no mercy and nearly superhuman control. She once trotted out this trick with a knife and a lighter that could bring anyone to their knees.

“Where the fuck did you learn that one?”  
  
“From a former beauty pageant queen,” she says, sliding her fingers impassively over the still-warm flat of the blade, “back in Texas. You could call her my sexual awakening.”

On her back, though, it’s a whole different story. It’s not just that she’s responsive; lots of people are, a long string of forgettable hookups has created a virtual catalogue of human sensations and proclivities. Root’s surrender is way outside that catalogue, much more intense. The way she opens to touch is deep and helpless: she quivers, practically blooms. It’s melty-hot, almost embarrassing in its obviousness but mostly–well–sweet. Like the way she whispers _Sameen_ between sticky kisses afterward–like she’s revealing her own delicious secret.

 

* * *

 

Root is too clingy. She wants too much. Her kisses burn; her hands wander and linger everywhere she’s allowed to touch. It feels good– _she_ feels good, all warmth and softness, better than anyone ever has–but her longing is obvious and there’s nothing to be done about it. There’s just her wanting, wanting, and the emptiness that answers: emptiness that has always been there and that can’t be fixed.

But Root doesn’t ask for what she knows she can’t have. Hell, she doesn’t seem to know know how much of her aching, obvious want that she’s telegraphing, without meaning to. Swatting her away in public is fair game, but it would seem cruel to point it out in so many words.

And crazy as it is to admit it, spending time with her has become a real highlight of these past weeks and months. Way too much fun to end this–whatever this is, just because of some misguided concern over her feelings. She’s a grown-ass woman who can take care of herself. If she says she’s fine, she’s fine. 

Except every now and then, when she isn’t. When her fingers tremble, or her lips, and it’s better to pretend not to notice and keep kissing her or touching her or letting her do the things she does so well with her hands and her mouth and her whole body.

After the Machine isn’t in her ear all of the time–just dead, heavy silence–it gets worse. Root’s lonely. She doesn’t have a regular place to crash, so she finds excuse after excuse to come over, to stay the night, until resisting just seems stupid, unkind. Besides, something’s shifted, seemingly overnight, and now it actually feels good to sleep next to someone else. 

Next to Root, specifically.

One night, out of the blue, on the border of sleep and waking, she turns over and scoots close, close enough to feel her breath.

“I miss Her,” she whispers. “So, so much.”

“I know.”

She settles in closer, presses warm, idle kisses everywhere she can reach. It’s desperate, intimate, and weeks or months ago might have been uncomfortable, but right now it’s just sad, to feel the heat of her kisses and the hollowness inside her.

 

* * *

 

Root’s mood picks up the next morning. She wakes up first, the way she usually does, and sneaks out to pick up breakfast somewhere in the neighborhood. Breakfast in bed is one of the better perks of her hanging around here all the time these days.

Wasn’t Root’s choice, in fairness. Someone had to keep tabs on her, to make sure she wasn’t going to do anything too stupid again, and there’s only ever been one real candidate for that job. 

The key was cheap to copy. There’s a little space cleared out in the corner for her things, although that pile has started a slow creep into the dresser drawers and kitchen shelves and medicine cabinet. It’s annoying in principle, but in practice, it’s no big deal. Wasn’t much in those places to begin with, so there’s plenty of room.

It’s weird–completely unexpected–but this new life together-ish is, well, kind of nice. Root being around gives the mornings and evenings texture, order, routine. It’s not a _relationship_ , of course. But the perks of a real relationship, in a purely hypothetical sense, have become a little less of a mystery since she started sleeping here full time. Someone to wake up to and come home to who doesn’t ask for much, just makes the bed and makes coffee and cleans the shower and replaces the shampoo when it runs out. 

Then there’s nighttime Root, the way she streaks into the apartment, trailing the excitement of her day like some kind of comet. There’s the sheer fun of being with her–in that shared definition of fun that’s very different from most people’s. Her kisses–the hot desperate kind and the slow steamy exploratory kind. Her beautiful slender body that never gets less delicious to uncover. The comfort of her warmth and steady breath deep in the night, her silhouetted chest rising and falling in easy rhythm, as she sleeps.

Happiness–contentment, anyway–has never been a strong suit. For Root either. It’s new and unsettling. There’s an undercurrent, an understanding, that this–whatever it is–is a for-now thing. This apartment, like the string of apartments before it, is temporary: a month-to-month lease, a place to crash. Nomads, drifters and soldiers don’t have homes, not really. 

There’s no such thing as forever. Fortunately, forever is not what Root needs. It’s now she wants–just now–and maybe that’s what makes this work.

 

* * *

 

“Do you ever wonder if things could have been different?” she asks, another morning, while making omelettes. Her back is to the bed, and it’s hard to argue with the view: Root in a loose white tank top and black underwear, shifting her weight between those ridiculous bunny slippers she likes so much, her hair tousled from sleep and her skin all peaches-and-cream in the light from the southern window.

“If what could have been different?” 

She tilts the pan thoughtfully in a circle, letting the raw egg spread over the perimeter until it forms a perfect moon.

“I don’t know,” she admits. “This. Our life– _my_ life. Thinking about it is… I don’t know how far back to unravel the thread. There are a lot of years to cover. A lot of mistakes, a lot of things that went wrong.” 

She sets down the pan on the range and starts to pick at the crisping edges of the eggs with a spatula. Last time she made omelettes, she mentioned that she used to make them for herself and her mom, back in Texas: eggs were pretty cheap where they were, and easy for a kid to cook. _I’ve upgraded the cheese since then,_ she added with a laugh.

Root has never had it easy, that’s for sure.

“I wonder whether I ever had a shot at a quiet life,” she concludes, resting the spatula on the counter. As she looks around, her eyes stop at the pile of dirty clothes on the floor, with a couple of her shirts mixed in. Then her gaze drifts to the bed, taking in the nest of sheets and pillows, and pivots back to her work without making eye contact.

“Quiet life is overrated. You’d be bored and hating it in a few days. A few weeks, tops.”

She glances over with a cryptic little smile. “You’re probably right,” she says, “but quiet moments can be nice, now and then. Like–like this.” Her cheeks flush then; she returns her attention quickly to the pan.

Maybe she has the right idea with those stupid slippers–the floorboards are super cold to walk on–but Root’s back is warm and soft to press against, and she relaxes into the contact instantly. The smell of her hair and her neck and that impossibly soft place behind her ear, mixed with the smell of the sizzling butter and eggs, feels like a substance in itself: something whole and suspended. 

“Yeah, Root. Now and then, it’s–really nice.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for the support and the absolutely lovely comments! Each one made me very happy.
> 
> I was pretty pleased to see a few of you noticed the technique I'm calling, for now, null POV - that is to say, local and limited, but not in 1st, 2nd, or 3rd person. It was something I wanted to try, and Shaw seemed like the perfect test case. For this fandom, you can assume if you see 2nd person from me, it's from Root's POV; if you see null, it's Shaw's.


End file.
